The 2 Most Dangerous Numbers in the Universe Could Signal the End of Physics

An extremely troubling and controversial line of
thinking has arose in the physics community. It’s the notion that we are getting
closer the absolute limit of what we can comprehend about the world around us
through science. A particle physicist, Harry Cliff, CERN said during a recent TED talk in Geneva, Switzerland “The next few years may tell us whether we’ll be
able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for
the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we
cannot answer”Just as frightening is the reason for
this imminent limit, which according to Cliff is: "Because the laws of
physics forbid it."

First Dangerous Number “The strength of the Higgs
field”: According to Cliff,the first dangerous number is a value that signifies
the power of what physicists call the Higgs field, an unseen energy field not completely
unlike other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos. As particles plunge
through the Higgs field, they get mass to ultimately become the protons,
neutrons, or covering all of the atoms that make everything around us. Without Higgs
field it, we wouldn’t be here.

There is no doubt about the existence of Higgs
field. And there’s something about the Higgs field that remains unresolvable
and continue to worry physicists like Cliff.

According to general relativity and the theory of
quantum, the Higgs field should be carrying out one of two tasks, says Cliff. Either
it should be turned off or turned on. If turned off, it should have a strength
value of zero and automatically giving no mass to particles. If turned on,as
the theory goes, this 'on value' is "completely enormous. But what physicists
observe back in 2012 does not match with neither of those two scenarios.

As Cliff says "In reality, the Higgs field is
just slightly on. It’s not zero, but it’s ten thousand trillion times weaker
than its fully on value - a bit like a light switch that got stuck just before
the 'off' position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different,
then there would be no physical structure in the Universe."

There is still no explanation about why the
strength of the Higgs field is so extremely weak, Physicists hope to find some positive
results from newly-upgraded particle accelerator at CERN. As for now, they’re
still hunting.

Dark energy, a repulsive force that’s accountable
for the accelerating growth of our Universe, was first measured in 1998. Nobody
knows what dark energy is, but several physicist including Cliff think that it’s
the energy of empty space itself or the energy of the vacuum itself.

If this turn outs to be the truth, we should be
able to sum up all the energy of empty space to get a number signifying the power
of dark energy. And even though theoretical physicists have tried, there’s one massive
problem with their answer:

Cliff said "Dark energy should be 10120 times
stronger than the value we observe from astronomy. This is a number so
mind-boggling huge that it’s impossible to get your head around … this number
is bigger than any number in astronomy - it’s a thousand trillion trillion
trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the Universe. That’s a pretty
bad prediction."

On the good side, we’re quite lucky that dark energy is lesser than theorists predict. If it followed our theoretical concepts,
then the repulsive force of dark energy would be so enormous that it would
literally rip our Universe apart. The essential forces that keep atoms together
would be completely ineffective against it and galaxies, stars, planets, and
life as we know it would not exist.

Physicists can’t use the present theories of the
Universe to pbtain a better measurement of dark energy that settles with current
observations. Even better than improving our concepts would be to find a way
that we can understand why the strength of dark energy and the Higgs field is
what it is.

This
post was written by Umer Abrar. To contact the author of this post, write to mirzavadoodulbaig@gmail.com
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The 2 Most Dangerous Numbers in the Universe Could Signal the End of Physics
Reviewed by Umer Abrar
on
3/15/2016
Rating: 5

So yes, the Higgs scalar presents us with the hierarchy problem. To me, any attempt to extrapolate from known physics to the Planck scale seems very, very bold (I probably fail to understand something here), and that factor of 10^120 - my guess is that it just tells us that we have not understood a fundamental point. I also worry about the future of high energy particle physics given the LHC results. But I would caution against "extremely troubling absolute limits" of what we will "ever" be able to find out about "the universe". So far, every new collider energy scale has brought new particles- and suddenly, after the Higgs, there should be 30 orders of magnitude with no new physics?Finally, the Euclid telescope (as I understand) will let us have a glimpse at the state equation of dark energy. So there's still new things to find out. Let's not be too pessimistic about what future generations of researchers are able to discover!